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Pain and violence towards women's bodies appear at every turn in Paulina Chiziane's 2002 novel Niketche: Uma história de poligamia, as the main plot revolves around the polygamous relationships between Tony, a senior police officer, and up to six different women from various parts of Mozambique. It can be argued that the novel proposes a new national allegory with female victims of polygamy at the center of a renewed, postcolonial Mozambique. Critics, such as Hilary Owen and Russell G. Hamilton, have studied Chiziane's feminist politics and her use of storytelling techniques. However, the entanglement of trauma and war in Niketche is largely absent in recent literary criticism. Through the analysis of interior dialogue by the narrator, Rami, in chapter one, this article offers a close reading of the ways in which female survivors of war and sexual trauma deal with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I assert that Chiziane's work enacts a two-fold history of personal and national trauma in a post-civil war and postcolonial setting in order to reconceptualize how traumatized women deal with their pain in cathartic and collective ways. The varied women's encounters with violence signal that multiple forms of trauma often intertwine.
